The Chartley white cattle are a genuinely old and distinctive breed, protected within the deer park at Chartley continuously since the herd was first enclosed under King Henry III back in 1225, a lineage of animals with a documented history stretching back nearly eight centuries. The cattle themselves, along with the ruins of Chartley Castle standing nearby, are well documented in their own right as a matter of real agricultural and architectural history, quite apart from anything supernatural.
What sits alongside that solid, verifiable history is a folk belief attached specifically to the herd by the Ferrers family, who held the Chartley estate for centuries: that the birth of a black calf among the otherwise uniformly white herd served as an omen, foretelling the death of a member of the family itself, the animal's unusual colouring read not as simple genetic variation but as a deliberate warning carried in the herd's own bloodline.
The superstition is recorded in several general folklore surveys of Staffordshire without any specific dated instance of a black calf's birth actually being followed by a Ferrers family death, which marks this as a tradition rather than a chronicled historical event with real evidence behind it. Even so, the pairing of a genuinely ancient, carefully managed herd of rare cattle with this kind of inherited omen belief makes for a distinctive piece of Staffordshire folklore in its own right, entirely separate from whatever ghost stories are attached to the nearby castle ruins themselves.
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